OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
President Joe Biden has a tendency to stretch the truth or, in many cases, obliterate it altogether, but the traditionally liberal mainstream media often covers for him.
However, it looks like those days may be over, at least for the Washington Post.
Over the past year or so, Biden has repeated the claim that under his leadership and with a Democrat-controlled Congress, he has slashed the national debt by trillions of dollars. But the claim simply isn’t true, and the Post continues to call the president out every time he repeats that false statement.
Most recently, Biden made the claim in a Thursday speech in West Columbia, South Carolina, bragging about his economic policies, during which he said he had reduced the deficit by $1.7 trillion since taking office in January 2021.
“And by the way, parenthetically, I want you to hear about the deficit. I cut the deficit $1.7 trillion in two years. Nobody’s ever done that – cut the debt $1.7 [trillion],” Biden told a crowd gathered at manufacturing company Flex LTD.
Fox News noted:
Biden has made the same claim on numerous occasions and, in April, earned a “Bottomless Pinocchio” rating for it from The Washington Post’s liberal chief fact-checker, Glenn Kessler.
Kessler, who called the claim “highly misleading,” previously gave Biden “three Pinocchios” when he made a different version of the claim in September of last year.
“He keeps saying it over and over,” Kessler noted in April. “By our count, at least 30 times since June he’s taken credit for reducing the budget deficit by $1.7 trillion.”
“All told, in those two years Biden increased the national debt about $850 billion more than originally projected,” he said. “In other words, again the data shows the deficit picture has worsened under Biden.”
In May, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a nonpartisan entity, disclosed that during the “first seven months of fiscal year 2023” under President Biden, the federal government had accumulated a federal deficit of nearly $1 trillion. The CBO’s findings indicated that within that timeframe alone, the federal government had incurred a total of $928 billion.
In August 2022, the Post fact-checked Biden with four Pinocchios — indicating a major lie — over a claim he made about a newly signed piece of legislation.
During a White House signing ceremony earlier this month for the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, legislation that will provide subsidies to bolster domestic manufacturing of computer chips and similar technology amid rising tensions with China, Biden’s claim about the number of jobs the bill would create earned him “four Pinocchios” in a Washington Post fact check on Thursday.
Biden bragged that the legislation would create 1 million new construction jobs over the next half-dozen years.
“There’s an analysis that says investment in the Chips and Science Act will create 1 million — more than 1 million construction jobs alone over the next six years building semiconductor factories in America,” Biden said.
The president made the same claim on Twitter just a couple of days later.
“Investments in the CHIPS and Science Law will create more than 1 million construction jobs alone over the next 6 years building semiconductor factories in America,” his Twitter account said.
Investments in the CHIPS and Science Law will create more than 1 million construction jobs alone over the next 6 years building semiconductor factories in America.
— President Biden (@POTUS) August 11, 2022
But fact-checkers said that the real number of construction jobs likely to be created by expanding chip factories in the U.S. is around 6,200.
“We’ve learned from experience that when a president utters a big job-creation number, it’s ripe for fact-checking,” Kessler wrote in The Washington Post. “So we were curious to learn how the president’s job prediction for the Chips and Science Act — which will provide nearly $53 billion for U.S. semiconductor research, development, manufacturing and workforce development — was developed.”
Kessler noted that Biden “mentioned an ‘analysis’ as the source for the claim that 1 million construction jobs would be created. … But we were puzzled when we did not see the figure in the White House’s ‘fact sheet’ on the bill.”
“It turns out this number is wildly exaggerated,” Kessler added, noting that his “first tip-off” that the number may be false was the sheer size.
